Credit Is Accelerationism

Introduction

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” — Friedrich Hayek

The simple fact is that we steal from the future to furnish our decadence in the present — a magic trick of modern finance. But like all tricks, the true cost remains hidden.

Credit offers the illusion of capacity while quietly eroding resilience. You could liken it to a narcotic: some can handle the high, others need more and more until they walk off a cliff.

We recognize this at the personal level. We shake our heads at the woman drowning in credit card debt or the man refinancing his house to fund a vacation. But when a corporation does the same — leveraging not only its future but everyone who works for it for a sliver of market share — we call it strategy. When a government does it, we simply call it stimulus.

This essay is about that double standard. It's about how credit — personal, corporate, and institutional — doesn’t just finance growth. It accelerates collapse when misused. And in a culture that rewards speed over substance, the slope from utility to addiction is slippery, steep, and paved with moral hazard.

II. The Illusion of Safety

The 2008 mortgage default crisis is often cited as a one-off event — a black swan triggered by exotic derivatives and subprime loans. But it wasn’t an anomaly. It was another glimpse into what happens when debt loses its relationship to risk.

Mortgages — once based on steady income and long-term commitment — became repackaged, resold, and divorced from the borrower's ability to pay. The consequence? Millions defaulted, banks failed, and the global economy seized.

This same dynamic can take root anywhere: in student loans, auto lending, corporate bonds, or sovereign debt. The underlying pattern is always the same — credit becomes abundant, risk is hidden, incentives are warped, and eventually the system buckles under its own weight.

III. Institutional Fragility and the Culture of Rescue

What we tolerate at the individual level becomes policy at scale. If we no longer require prudence from a borrower, why would we expect restraint from a bank, a corporation, or a government?

The same moral inversion that defines the student loan crisis — risk without scrutiny, debt without discipline — defines our institutional relationship to credit as well. And when the numbers grow large enough, we stop talking about right and wrong altogether. We speak instead in abstractions: too big to fail, systemic risk, market confidence.

In this environment, credit becomes not just normalized, but essential. Entire industries operate on borrowed money — not to weather emergencies, but to survive day to day. Zombie companies live off zero-interest financing, not profit. Governments roll over debt to pay off old debt. Markets soar not on productivity, but on the expectation that central banks will continue to flood the system with cheap liquidity.

And when it all begins to teeter, we no longer ask who made these decisions or what moral hazard we are now underwriting. We simply call for a bailout. A stimulus. A reset. We rescue the institutions that took the most risk, and punish savers, workers, and citizens who lived within their means.

The cycle is clear: institutions overextend, collapse under the weight of their own leverage, and are then propped up in the name of preserving “stability.” But stability built on denial is not stability at all. It is stagnation at best, complete collapse at worst.

What we’re witnessing isn’t just financial fragility — it is cultural. A society that no longer distinguishes between necessity and indulgence, between saving and speculation, between earned growth and artificial expansion, is a society that has lost any semblance of a North Star.

In this, credit looks much like any intoxicant. Perhaps intrinsically neutral, credit amplifies the character of whoever wields it. In the hands of the prudent, it is a lever. In the hands of the reckless, it is a fuse.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, markets panicked — not just because of the virus, but because the system was already saturated with risk. Years of artificially low interest rates had encouraged corporations to gorge on debt, not to invest or innovate, but to buy back their own stock and juice short-term earnings. The corporate bond market had ballooned to over $10 trillion, with a massive share rated just one notch above junk.

Then the music stopped. As revenues collapsed and cash flow dried up, the corporate debt market froze. Investors fled. Companies faced a reckoning — one that, under any sane regime of risk and reward, should have forced a reckoning with leverage.

But, the reckoning never came. Instead, the Federal Reserve stepped in — for the first time in history — to buy corporate bonds, including those of companies already teetering on insolvency. Junk bonds, fallen angels, and speculative-grade debt were backstopped by public authority. The Fed created special vehicles to absorb the risk, using taxpayer money as collateral.

Among the corporations whose debt was purchased or underwritten by the Fed were Ford, Boeing, Apple, AT&T, Carnival Cruise Lines, and Delta Airlines. Some, like Apple, had no real need for rescue — they were simply part of the investment-grade index. Others, like Carnival and Ford, were already in serious trouble before the pandemic. They had borrowed recklessly and were rated as “fallen angels” — teetering on junk — when the crisis hit. Yet instead of allowing the market to impose consequences, the Fed absorbed the risk. This wasn’t a rescue. It was an endorsement — of fragility, of irresponsibility, of a system where the only real risk is being too small to matter.

This is the culture of rescue: risk privatized during the boom, loss socialized during the bust. Failure without consequence. Leverage without restraint.

The same pattern that traps the student in lifelong debt now props up corporations that should have collapsed years ago. In both cases, the message is the same: don’t worry about cost. Just borrow. Just accelerate. The future will sort it out.

But eventually, it won’t.

IV. Language as Camouflage

None of this would be possible without the right vocabulary. Risk has to be disguised. Consequence must be renamed. To preserve the illusion, we rely on a dense thicket of euphemism and abstraction — the linguistic armor of a system that no longer believes in truth.

We don’t say bailout. We say liquidity injection.We don’t say reckless lending. We say credit access.We don’t say collapse. We say temporary dislocation.We don’t say fraud. We say creative accounting.We don’t say inflation. We say price volatility.We don’t say cronyism. We say public-private partnership.

The function of this language is not to clarify but to suppress judgment. It sterilizes cause and effect. It severs moral accountability from decision-making.

A civilization must be able to speak plainly about things to truly get to the heart of the matter and be productive.  I am reminded of the wisdom of Confucius: "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success."

The more complex and fragile the system becomes, the more jargon it requires to justify itself. Instead of truth, we get narrative management. Instead of prudence, we get models. And instead of responsibility, we get “mitigation strategies.”

But there is no substitute for reality. And no amount of technocratic vocabulary can disguise what credit has become: a permission slip for denial, dressed in the language of growth.

V. Reclaiming Restraint and Moral Causality

A civilization cannot flourish on illusions. It cannot build permanence on denial, or coherence on euphemism. Eventually, reality asserts itself. The bill comes due. And when it does, the only real protection is not more leverage — it’s character.

Credit, in its proper place, is a tool of last resort. It should be used sparingly, reluctantly, and with full awareness of risk. But in our era, it has become a default operating system — for individuals, institutions, and governments alike. We no longer ask whether we should borrow. We ask only how much, and at what rate.

The answer isn’t more regulation, more bailouts, or more financial engineering. The answer is simpler, older, and harder: rebuild a culture of restraint.

That begins with reattaching consequence to risk — and clarity to language. If you borrow, you are responsible. If you default, you have failed. If you mislead, you must answer for it. These are not punitive judgments. They are the foundations of trust — the invisible architecture of every healthy society.

A sane order would limit access to credit until trust is earned:- No student loan without a qualified co-signer or demonstrated academic discipline.- No corporate debt backstop without full transparency and post-crisis accountability.- No institutional safety net for those who gamble with leverage and lose.

Risk is not a bug, it is a feature; a signal that keeps the system honest.

We don’t need a new financial model. We need older virtues: honesty, thrift, foresight, accountability. The kinds of habits that once made a man blush to ask for a loan he hadn’t earned. The kinds of values that demanded a business prove its worth before expanding. The kinds of principles that made a nation cautious about what it promised, and to whom.

If we do not reclaim those habits, the outcome is not in doubt. A society that treats credit as infinite and risk as optional will one day find itself with nothing to show for itself but collapse and decay.

I am not optimistic. I do not think that modern society is made of the kinds of people with the spine to do what is necessary to correct course. The acceleration ends, eventually. But when it does, it will be when we careen into a brick wall.

I hope Ford didn’t finance its crumple zones.